Thursday, December 20, 2012

Note on guns: My brother loved to play all sorts of gun
games when we were kids. And sword fights. Roman soldiers. Cops and Robbers.
All that.

I liked making the swords and daggers. We would whittle
small lumber into weapons. Strap on belts. Run around and actually use the
weapons…playing, of course. Careful not to stab. It was fun, sort of. I got
bored. I did like running around, though.

My brother liked army toys, army men, especially, and
eventually joined the Navy, though during his four years he mostly ran the ship
store. He saw no action. However, the
destroyer he was on did have nuclear weapons.

The Navy was not as much fun for him as childhood games.

The amount of war-play that goes on with boys is huge. I saw
it first hand. It is no wonder that when they grow up, boys (and girls) like to
own guns, shoot guns, kill shit.

I believe the only answer is to change our culture. Instead
of, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”

How about, “Whoop, Whoop, I hit you with a corn cob?”

Couldn’t we somehow teach kids to use that eye-hand
thing--the thing that makes you feel good when you HIT SOMEONE with a FAKE
BULLET---into simple scoring? Like---It feels so good to hit a target? But more
like a ball into a hoop? Or is this Bang-Bang-You’re-Dead thing simply hard
wired? I don’t know.

__________________________________________________

I love cults. I loved THE MASTER. See it. It’s brilliant. It’s maddening. It’s
incredibly unsettling. It’s agitating. It’s beautiful. This guy can make a
movie. Paul Thomas Anderson. Joaquin Phoenix as the scoundrel-drunk and Philip
Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic leader? What more could you want?

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

My good friend, Jeanne Dorsey, shot a movie. It's so beautiful. And has famous-type actors in it and she needs finishing money. I know! I know! Everyone wants money! If you are feeling generous, or are at all interested, take a click. It's so beautiful. And, you know, give. :)
May the Season find you...exactly as you intended.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."I believe if one were to interpret this amendment, one must begin with the first subordinate clause, "A well regulated Militia,"In order to well regulate the militia, it makes sense to keep all the guns within our militia. If people want to keep and bear arms, the best way to keep this well regulated is to have the militia hold onto a gun with your name on it. If you really want a gun in your house, well, a tiny lady Wesson should probably do the trick.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

I am on the advisory board of VS, the best small theater in Los Angeles. And I am advising you to send FIVE BUCKS before 2PM this Friday. (OR MORE) But it doesn't take but a second to hand five bucks over to someone, right? With little or no thought. Painless.

VS. is SO CLOSE TO REACHING THEIR GOAL---THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ARE AT STAKE HERE! Without a little push-over-the-edge, all those pledges could go pffffft.

So click and give a pleasant electric shock to the new lighting board, the new seats, the refurbing. Please.

Now hear this—I am on the advisory board of this theater
company. They are award winning. They are the best small theater in Los Angeles,
I.M.H.O. And, they need your support.
Donate early and often. The Kickstarter runs out in a few days. Johnny Clark,
the artistic director, is passionate, smart, talented and has a good head of
hair. Click and give the love.

Strangely, one of my old friends from college and I were
having lunch, eating tartines...mine was egg salad with capers...followed by an
apple/almond tart when we witnessed all of this going down. Well, mostly
witnessed the people witnessing it, followed by the police tape going up, etc.
Merry Christmas, New York!

The Perks of Being a
Wall Flower is a pretty good title…though my vote would have been to call
it Mixed Tapes. Then maybe I would
have skipped it?

As someone who has fit in and not fit in, in serious
absolute value and in cramping quick sequence, I have to say this movie hit me
hard. In fact, to rub my Matrix-like layered nose in it, even the independent
company that made this film has included me and not included me at times in
real life in their esteem for and understanding of me as a writer and as an actor
and I them, as I introduced them at one point, underestimating their value, to
a Japanese commercial producer with claims to financing I once worked for who,
in turn, had felt accepted and rejected at many times in HIS life, working with
Madonna and Brad Pitt, on and off and then off for good. (It was a weird lunch.
Promises to connect again. Which never happened.) In the end, I have fond memories of this film
company for all their interesting work and our mutual respect. From the
Japanese producer’s office, I cadged seven pairs of Brad Pitt’s pants from a
commercial shoot, which all eventually had to be hemmed, but I can honestly
say, not let out at the waist.

But I digress.

The movie was well acted. The girl from those Harry Potter
movies is going to be a great adult actress star. Some call her Emily Watson. I
call her a younger, sane Jennifer Jason Leigh. And this Logan Lerman…call me a racist bitch with no
grace and a presumptive negativity, but where are all these gorgeous young Jews
coming from?

They were both wonderful.

I wish I could say the mushy script wasn’t laughable. But
maybe that was the point? That teenagers are overwrought and overly
sentimental? I’m being generous here. I don’t think so.

I love that it took place in Pittsburgh, one of the great geologically
interesting cities in the country…with those rivers coming together and the
high bluffs. My high school girlfriend, long suffering with me as her
ambivalent mate, went to college in Pittsburgh
for only a semester. I drove out west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, late on a
Friday night, through awful fog in a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, with my sister to
visit her. My sister went to visit a friend of hers in another nearby town. I stayed
in my girlfriend’s dorm room and spent most of the weekend smoking cigarettes
and truly, fully falling in love with Joni Mitchell as I turned the vinyl over
and over again to listen to both sides of Court
and Spark. It was the suspended chords and the sad lyrics. I think I was
sad. I think my girlfriend was sad. Joni was certainly sad. All three of us
wanted to be pop stars and only one of us succeeded.

Back to the creators of this movie. These are smart people.
All of them. And stylish. And able. At the lunch I put together with my
Japanese boss at some standard fancy Italian Beverly Hills eatery, I was all
but forgotten as they sat there trading stories about this or that A-lister and
others they had in common. But lucky for me, the very cool S.C. was right next
to me (See, I withheld that information…why? Why do we wait to give certain
information when we tell our stories? It’s so manipulative. Baah!) S.C. was the
mule of their office and a big fan of mine and we got through it together, that
Hollywood lunch that went nowhere. Our support never waned. She’s writing plays
now. Go S.C.!

This movie made me remember how sad I was, on and off, from
14 to 20. How, at times, you were so elated and life was so incredible. And how
at other times, you really thought you were going completely fucking crazy.
And, at least for me, how you did go crazy at one point and then you just had
to piece it back together. Just trying to hold on. To insist upon being part of
the population even though you had no idea what that part was.

I’d say it is worth watching. As long as you can forgive the
clunky storytelling. You do get ahead of it as it rolls by. But hey! You’re
watching kids!

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

I admit that there is something wrong with me. When I was a
friendless child, in order to give my life structure and also in order to have
a relationship to something that was outside myself, I would come home from
school and with a hit of joyful brain chemicals, grab the local paper, The Journal News, and read Ann Landers
and the Comics, every day. For a period of about six months, because I had very
little else to do and wanted to declare my allegiance to the only consistent
friend I had, I would cut out the Peanuts
cartoon, the short weekly black and white one. Then, I would put a small
hole at the most left panel and string it onto a piece of black yarn. I was
collecting them. Like ducks on a string. Some people had stuffed animals. Or
imaginary friends. I had a compulsion.

But then, after I had a pretty thick pile of these cartoons,
my better sense took over, my sentiment waned and I thought, “Why the hell am I
saving these? And why didn’t I cut this piece of yarn longer? This is never
going to work. And even if this does work, what? Then I’m going to have these
piles of cut out cartoon strips on black pieces of yarn? What am I going to do
with them all? People will think I’m crazy. And what about the big colorful
Sunday one? It won’t fit on this string. What a mess.” And I threw them out and never collected
anything else again. Except for those
buttons/pins like “Help Make Hillcrest Cleaner and Greener” and “Nixon”
But about fifteen years ago, I gave all those to my nephew. I saved a
few cool ones. I am definitely not a collector.

And though there is not really a collecting strain in me, or
it was basically willed out of me, there is something even worse. A kind of
efficiency mixed with cheapness that is, ultimately, something a little out of
my control. If I buy something it must be used or I feel guilty I committed to
the purchase. Not because I do not deserve the thing, but more because I have a
cellular revulsion against waste. Plus, facing all truths, I am obsessive. So
if there is something around that must be done, I feel compelled to do it. Age
is lessening this urge since I am tiring out and already have committed to too
many things. But I do face what so many others endure for so many different
reasons. The scourge of the arriving New
Yorkers.

I subscribe to the The
New Yorker and the bitches pile up and the rule I made early on was, “When
they get to more than five deep, I can throw out the whole lot.” And I do.

Though when I lived in Los Angeles, they would end up in our
personal recycling can and I would feel guilty--so maybe an hour later, okay
ten minutes later, or three, I would go back to the blue can, pull them out and
leaf through them and think, “Yeah, I really want to read these.” And sometimes I would keep them, hoping I’d
be on a long plane ride soon so I would have time to finish them up. But more
often, I would toss them back in the can. A relief. So I am able to compulsively keep the sharp
rule of recycling unread piles of five that cuts through the murkier large
compulsion of committing to a magazine subscription. But still, I do let them
build up to at least that layer of five taunters. And they plague me. Stare at
me. Dare me. The monsters. The life suckers. The all important beasts.

But today I realized something. Why wait until they build up
to five? In fact, if the next one comes and I haven’t finished the one from the
week before, why not SIMPLY TOSS THAT HORRIBLE TYRRANICAL OVERLY LONG ARTICLED
BRAIN CONTROLLER into the DUMPER right at that moment, and treat it like the
periodical that it is?

And so I am committing to that. Enough. I’m exhausted.
Otherwise, how will I ever have the time to read any important books? Like Tina
Fey’s Bossy Pants? It is going to be such a better life from
this day forward.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

When I was a wee person, we moved from NorthernWestchesterCounty,
just outside of Peekskill, to Spring ValleyNY. When I went to school, we had the usual
things like---felt, crayons, the alphabet. And eventually show and tell.

I think it was the Third Grade, so I was 8? And this girl,
Jackie, with lots of freckles, got up and did a little report or something…on
the wars in Israel.

I was blown away. The 1948 stuff. The 1967 big to-do. The
Yom Kippur nasties. All of it. At 8, I sat there and I thought a few things:

Jackie,
you are so sweet and shy, why are you up there in front of the class
talking about war?

Jackie,
your parents must have told you all about this.

Jackie,
you are only 8. Why are you identifying with this little country so far
away where you don’t even live?

Jackie,
you seem excited about knowing all about these wars. Proud even. And this
scares me. I didn’t know there were all these wars going on. Let’s wrap
this up.

And since then, besides having a recurring dream that Jackie
is in our beige family station wagon and she takes off her pants and for some
reason she has a penis that she’s sort of proud of even though it’s rather
vestigial and flops there useless obscuring her girl genitalia, I often think
of Jackie whenever I see something in the newspaper about a war or skirmish
going on in Israel.

I haven’t been 8 in a long time.

Not to be a glib bitch who’s pretending to be funny, but
I’ve had enough hearing about these wars and I want them to end.

I was a kid during Vietnam and I was terrified of
growing up and having to go to war. Everyone hates war (except those who
don’t). No more war. Please.

I still can’t believe all those facts Jackie had at her
fingertips. I was so overburdened by it then that ever since, I never read more
than the first line of any news item about war in the Middle
East. It’s too repetitive.